With the pandemic, dilemmas have become legion. Is health and safety more or less important than the economy? Is wearing masks more or less important than personal liberty? When highly prized values conflict and the parent or teacher has to figure out compromises to manage the internal conflict, dilemmas pinch.
Individual rights, family pressures, and community imperatives clash. Most schools shifted immediately to distance learning. With 13,000 school districts and no national plan for closing or re-opening schools, superintendents, principals, and teachers faced one dilemma after another. Some districts stayed open since March, closed and reopened and then closed again. Ditto for schools. Concerned about their health and that of their families, many teachers chose remote instruction. Other teachers who could choose in-school instruction teach students they sorely missed. None of this, of course, is new to teachers who must figure out compromises that work when personal and professional values tug at one another.
Such difficult choices occurred around one of the ways that teaching and learning have been reconfigured due to the pandemic: hybrid schooling. Many districts blend in-person classroom lessons with remote instruction. Some students sit in the classrooms masked and physically distanced while the teacher also deals with those students on Teams or Zoom. Variation in how much of CONTINUE READING: Hybrid Teaching: Classroom Dilemmas | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice